Catherine Gonick
Split Daughter of Eve
by Catherine Gonick
ISBN: 9781962405164
$16.00 (+ $4.63 US Shipping)
Also available as an Ebook from online retailers: ISBN 9781962405171
Catherine Gonick published her debut collection of poetry, Split Daughter of Eve, with Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2025. She is a winner of the Ina Coolbrith Prize for Poetry and was a finalist in the Louisville Actors Theatre 10-Minute Play Contest. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry: Pick of the Week and Verse Daily, in journals including Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Pedestal, The Orchards Poetry Journal, One Art, Of The Book, The Nu Review, and The New Verse News, and in anthologies including in plein air; Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing; Support Ukraine; and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion, and Choice. She lives in the Hudson Valley, where she works with her husband in a company that seeks to slow the rate of global warming.
Monster in the Ladies’ Room
Listening to the uproar
over the very idea
you’d think
she had never been seen before
was a horror not even
imagined until now
that the shouters
lawfully barring the door
had never read
about her like
nor visited a museum
gazed at a statue
of Hermaphroditus
like the one at the Ashmolean.
A marble torso
of a naked woman with small
breasts and a small penis
who unites
two sexes
in one slim body
this once venerated
human figure
stands before the viewer
unscared
knowing she is sacred.
Alpha
On your evening walk, you wonder
when your dog might decide.
She whines, strains at her leash,
as if now is the time
to take back all she gave up
for kibble, a vet, a warm bed,
and, of course, your love. Are you
still worth her unthinking
devotion? The eons you took
to let her approach your fire?
Tonight might be the night
she remembers to ask
the moon what kind of wolf
becomes a dog, and gives you up
like a bone you tossed too far.
